During much of the 1950s the question of responsibility for Nazi crimes had become ever less a subject of public debate or, seemingly, private concern. ‘Denazification’ as enforced by the victorious powers had come – and gone. The Federal Republic had joined the ranks of democratic nations and was needed as an ally; it had paid pretty heavy reparations, not least to Israel, and it felt rather proud to have risen from the ruins so soon. (Perhaps it felt prouder still to have won the 1954 football World Cup in Switzerland against all odds, an event recalled for decades afterwards as ‘the miracle of Berne’.) Most Germans preferred to enjoy the goodies of the Wirtschaftswunder and draw a double line under what had happened before 1945, that time-barrier comfortingly defined as ‘year zero’. If nonetheless forced to look back further, they could marshall plenty of reasons close to excuses for the birth and vileness of the ‘Third Reich’, from the fateful iniquity of the Versailles treaty to the bewildering speed with which the Nazis had moved to crush opposition once they were in power. Besides, it could be asked (but usually wasn’t): hadn’t the western wartime victors themselves appeased the Führer in the 1930s, welcomed his role as a ‘bulwark against communism’, even half-envied his ability to bring order out of chaos? Hadn’t they and others failed to intervene decisively on behalf of the Jews even when the Nuremberg racial laws showed the way the wind was blowing? Such questions about guilt and responsibility were far from superfluous, but most Germans rightly realised they were not the ideal people to pose them – even in retrospect. Better, it was felt, to skirt the whole minefield in the hope that with time it would rust away to oblivion. Naturally there were those, among them a strong minority of trenchant authors and journalists, who deplored this attitude and fought against it, but the Zeitgeist was massively against them.
By the early 1960s, though, the mood was changing – in part because the outside world forced it to do so. For months on end in 1961, the painful past was literally brought home to millions of Germans via the high-profile trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who had organised the mass deportation of Jews to the death camps. Meanwhile communist East Germany was intensifying its written and verbal barrage against former Nazis holding key jobs in the Federal Republic. Although couched in puerile jargon and clearly meant to destabilise the ‘ideological foe’ in the west, many of the charges had too strong a basis in fact to be dismissed as ‘mere propaganda’. They had, indeed, played a part in the enforced resignation in 1960 of Theodor Oberländer, the Bonn minister for refugees who was said to have colluded in war crimes in Poland. A few years before Adenauer could probably have shrugged off such a challenge to a member of his cabinet, but his power was on the wane.
Such outside pressure aside, the flagging domestic drive to unmask Nazi criminals had been given an unexpected boost in 1958 when the federal Länder agreed to set up a central office to coordinate their hitherto disparate investigations. The action was taken in response to a single particularly obnoxious case uncovered almost by chance; but as a result of it, and despite a subsequent decision by the Bundestag that broadly speaking blocked prosecution for Nazi crimes other than murder, the ugly face of the ‘Third Reich’ began to loom larger again in the public consciousness. It became virtually unignorable with the launching in 1963 of the first of the ‘Auschwitz trials’, in which more than two hundred of the camp’s survivors testified in Frankfurt against those of their former persecutors who could be rounded up. In contrast to the Nazi ringleaders hauled before the Nuremberg tribunals nearly two decades before, most of the Frankfurt accused had been underlings in the chain of command. That, though, did not make their ‘I was only obeying orders’ defence and evident lack of remorse any the less shocking. If anything the very absence of a ‘top person’ as scapegoat helped underline how broad the connivance in brutality and slaughter had been.
All of this helped give a special, ultimately lethal, cutting edge to the youthful revolt in the Federal Republic in the late 1960s. In older democracies like Britain and France – even in an America agonisingly torn over Vietnam – an underlying attachment to the nation and its history survived all the demos and clarion calls to ‘Marxist internationalism’. What, though, could young Germans find to be proud of about their Vaterland – a word likely to arouse embarrassment or contempt on the rare occasions it was used at all? In many youthful minds the Adenauer era was identified with stuffy conservatism and the – now-fading – Wirtschaftswunder. And before that? Defeat on the battlefield, and, so it seemed, responsibility for unprecedented mass murder. What honour could one have for fathers who shifted uncomfortably when asked what they did in the war; what respect for professors who prevaricated about their stance during the ‘Reich’; what confidence in a political system that led to a ‘grand coalition’ – one, moreover, headed by a chancellor (Kiesinger) who had been a member of the Nazi party?
No wonder the rebellion in Germany turned so bitter nor that, in the Baader-Meinhof gang (later the Red Army Faction), it spawned a sect of youthful terrorists that left a trail of blood for years. The polarisation and violence might have become still more extreme had not a centre-left alliance between Social Democrats and liberals narrowly managed to oust the ‘grand coalition’ after a general election in 1969. Affirming that ‘now Hitler has really lost the war’, the Social Democratic leader and former wartime exile, Willy Brandt, became chancellor, the Bundestag enjoyed a real opposition again (this time made up of conservatives dumbfounded at losing government power after two decades) and, at least in part as a result, protest faded from the streets.
True to form, Winifred abhorred the rise of the ‘Sozis’ and pinned what political hopes she still had on the radical, nationalist right, especially the newly founded National Democratic Party that by the late 1960s had won seats in seven Land parliaments – though none in the Bundestag. She was delighted when the National Democratic boss, Adolf von Thadden, attended the festival in 1968, and at least as happy a year later when Oswald Mosley, the former leader of the British fascists, turned up with his still-dazzling wife Diana (ex-Guinness, née Mitford). Not so Wolfgang. Keen to ensure memories were not jogged about ‘New Bayreuth’s’ brown past, he implored his mother to keep her politics to herself, or at least within her own circle of USA (‘blessed Adolf’) fans. According to Winifred, her anxious son even offered her money to decamp for a time so that she would not become the focus of the National Democratic rally that was planned in the town, but eventually not held.3
That did not mean the festival director sympathised with the swing to the left in Bonn, let alone with young rebels whose noisy marches on occasion took them even to the hallowed ground of the Green Hill. To his annoyance – if hardly, by this time, surprise – his obdurate son Gottfried, still more critical of ‘fusty’ Bayreuth after swings through the ‘cleansing air’ of London and Paris, defended the demonstrators and buried himself in leftist literature. Still, whatever Wolfgang felt personally about the changes under way in politics and society, he realised the festival needed to take account of them in its approach to the works of the Master. He was also at least as well aware as anyone that with Wieland gone, his own relatively conservative productions would have to be supplemented with the work of outsiders. It nonetheless came as a shock to many of the Bayreuth faithful (and especially to Winifred) when the new Tannhäuser in 1972 was placed in the able but unloving care of Götz Friedrich, a sharp-eyed disciple of Felsenstein in communist East Berlin. What emerged gave a slant of ‘socialist realism’ to the piece that outraged the diehards but helped ensure, as Wolfgang surely hoped, that the festival stayed ‘up to date’ and in the news.
Unlike Gottfried, the Wieland children had never been in a clinch with their father – at least not over politics and history – and after 1966 they saw no cause to besmirch his memory. Why attack a revolutionary who, so it seemed, had fought on the right side from the start? Their critical fire was directed in the first place at their granny Winifred (‘hailed’ as a dragon in a birth
day message they unkindly sent her), then at their ‘ogre’ Uncle Wolfgang – then, from various student bastions scattered across the country, at the conservative ‘establishment’ generally. Not that all members of the Wieland quartet campaigned with equal vigour. Curiously, it was the pensive, seemingly delicate, ballet-loving Nike – the second youngest child – who metamorphosed into the most ‘way out’ of the four. For a few years she shouted ‘Ho Chi Minh’ with the best (or worst) of her contemporaries, hopped from one student commune to another, sampled LSD and ‘free love’, and longed to get married in the ‘socialist paradise’ of Cuba – a yearning unfulfilled.
Fortunately for her intellectual and emotional education, Nike fell in love when she was just out of her teens with a Dresden-born composer, writer and broadcaster of Jewish origin called Wolf Rosenberg, who had fled to Palestine in the 1930s and returned to Germany after the war. Old enough to have been her father, vastly learned and blessed with a wry humour, Rosenberg quickly persuaded the starry-eyed young lady to drop her ‘useless’ course at the Munich conservatory and to place her studies in his hands. His abhorrence of the conventional in music, literature and lifestyle intensified her own, his favourite composers tended to become hers – from Berlioz through Mahler and Berg to Ligeti (with, along the way, deep bows of admiration before the ‘modernity’ of Richard Wagner and the insight of Wieland’s productions). Later their ways parted. After a spell in the US fancying herself as a composer of electronic music, Nike settled in Vienna and became a pungent – sometimes feared – writer and critic. The Wagner name naturally helped her make her way, but for her breadth of knowledge and keenness of judgement she owed much to free-thinker Rosenberg.
Of the other two sisters Iris, the first-born child, immersed herself as a photographer and writer in the heady life of Berlin, putting Wahnfried, the festival and associated squabbles at an emotional as well as geographic distance. As for Daphne, the youngest and prettiest of the girls (named by her prescient parents after an irresistible nymph chased through a late opera by Richard Strauss), she became a busy Munich-based actress as much at home in Sartre as in Aeschylus. She also lent lustre to a marathon film epic about her great-grandfather Richard, and – hardly less appropriately – to a TV series showing how a German (industrial) dynasty came to throw in its lot with Hitler. At least in the early years, though, her life was as dramatic offstage as on – perhaps more so since she was wooed and won by Udo Proksch, an enfant terrible of Viennese society who pursued beautiful women and often-shady business schemes with equal vigour. Luckily for Daphne, her marriage to Proksch did not last long – albeit long enough for her ambitious spouse to head for Bayreuth in a bid to extract financial benefit from his famous new in-laws. He did not succeed. Shunned with rare unanimity by the whole clan, he was later jailed for murder in connection with a huge Austrian insurance fraud and died behind bars. Daphne meanwhile found a steadier partner in Tilman Spengler, a learned author of leftish views whose barbs of irony pierced many targets, Bayreuth and its public included.
Winifred thought little of these bids by the Wieland girls for professional and personal fulfillment – so different from the practical training that she had undergone before taking on a husband and family. Her granddaughters, she sniffed, refused even to learn housekeeping let alone do any. She thought still less of the flamboyant lifestyle of her grandson Wolf Siegfried, who had incurred her displeasure with a notable bêtise a year before his father died. While poking about in a junk room at Wahnfried, ‘Wummi’ had come across an old picture of his great-great-grandfather Liszt – one of those heirlooms that Wieland had cast into near oblivion when he and Gertrud modernised the family seat in the early 1950s. Impecunious as ever and less than enthralled by such evidence of distant ancestry, the young man assumed he could transform the seemingly forgotten object into a bit of ready cash with no questions asked. It turned out, though, that he had dug up near-buried treasure – an original portrait by the French neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres dedicated to the Countess d’Agoult, Cosima’s mother. The work landed in a Munich auction room and the family, under pressure from a livid Winifred, had to scrape up the funds to buy it back.4
The ‘Ingres affair’ was just one warning sign of how easily the Wagner heritage could be whittled away. Much of value had, of course, already been lost to the bombs that hit Wahnfried in 1945, and subsequently to souvenir-hungry occupation troops. As for that cache of the Master’s manuscripts that had been bunkered away in Berlin, it had almost certainly gone up in smoke along with its owner – the Führer. Such ‘blows of fate’ apart, though, various other Wagnerian items somehow vanished from view in Bayreuth to pop up again, if at all, in unexpected places. Usually the articles in question were fairly trivial, peddled by this or that family member whose ‘humble means’, to coin Shakespeare’s phrase, ‘matched not his [or her] haughty spirits’. In some cases, however, the objects were far from negligible.
The original score of Tristan, for instance – one of the treasures Wieland and Bodo Lafferentz had spirited away to their Nussdorf retreat near the end of the war – mysteriously turned up much later in Barcelona. Just how and why it got there remains a matter of dissent. Some claim that Wieland placed it there to be sold ‘on the quiet’ – although the noiseless disposal of such an object, worth a fortune on the open market, would hardly have been possible. Another version by a Bayreuth insider has it that the score was transferred to the ‘safe haven’ of Franco’s Spain at the height of the cold war, for fear an east–west conflict might erupt on German soil. Exactly what happened then is also in dispute. Who first insisted on the return of the much-travelled opus? Was it Winifred, backed on this occasion by Friedelind who had long opposed any disposal of the Master’s manuscripts? Or was it, rather less likely, Friedelind’s old flame Gottfried von Einem? He claims that, thanks to a tip he was given in Switzerland, he managed to head off the score’s impending sale in Barcelona and warned German authorities what was in the wind. (He also holds, incidentally, that he and his baroness mother were themselves offered – but refused – the original manuscript of the Siegfried Idyll.5) Anyway, there is no doubt that the Tristan score was finally lugged back somewhat furtively in a bag to Bayreuth, where it has rested in safety to this day.
Whatever her role in the Tristan case, it is clear that by the mid-1960s at the latest Winifred had become deeply worried about the gradual disappearance of heirlooms large and small. Naturally she was angry when objects simply vanished that had already been in place at Wahnfried when she had married Siegfried half a century before. Her reaction, though, had next to nothing to do with nostalgia or sentimentality. She knew as well as Wolfgang where the real wealth lay – not in the family home that badly needed rebuilding, nor in the Festspielhaus that drained funds year after year for upkeep and modernisation, but in the archive with its depleted but still precious (to true Wagnerians priceless) stock of scores, manuscripts, first editions, pictures and other mementos ‘on which the Master’s eye had rested’. In her view it was vital to keep this hoard intact – but could its cash value somehow be realised all the same, so that a tidy sum would flow into near-empty family pockets? Similarly, while it seemed unthinkable simply to sell off Wahnfried to the highest bidder, might not a way be found to have the place restored and preserved as a Wagnerian shrine at someone else’s expense? Last but not least (especially not to Wolfgang), how could the festival’s long-term viability and artistic independence be secured while relieving the family of the financial risk?
The time had come for the rebirth of an old idea. Nearly a hundred years earlier, the debt-plagued Master had vainly proposed the creation of a publicly funded foundation to take over the festival and guarantee its survival. In 1914, Siegfried had claimed (honestly or not) that he and his mother were working on a similar scheme under which the Wagner legacy would be given in its entirety ‘to the German people’. In 1946 Franz Beidler had drawn up his abortive plan under which the Nazi-tainted
Wagners would have been dispossessed and the festival turned over to a foundation not exclusively German. Twenty years later, backed in principle if not always in detail by Wolfgang, Winifred began to compose her own variation on the same theme. At first she had in mind a solely Bavarian foundation run by a council on which the Wagners would always have a majority vote – and hence the power to appoint one of their number as festival director. That cosy concept came to nothing. Indeed, given the family friction and the number of public bodies that gradually became involved, it is a wonder that accord was reached on any scheme at all.
The search got off to a dreadful start in early 1968 when a family meeting called by Winifred to discuss her plan broke up amid mutual threats and insults. The press subsequently pounced with gusto on juicy details of the scrap, fed at least partly by Friedelind who had had a particularly bitter exchange with Wolfgang. As a result of this and other disclosures Mausi was forbidden by her livid brother to set foot in the Festspielhaus, a ban she nonetheless dodged at festival time with the help of Isabella Wallich, her old friend from London days. Tickets were obtained in Isabella’s name and Friedelind crept into her seat at the last moment when the lights were being dimmed and there was less danger of being spotted. Recalling this covert operation many years later, the resolute English visitor wrote that had a ‘guard’ (i.e. attendant) sought to evict the two of them she would have stood her ground and staged a furious row.6 No doubt Mausi would have done the same. Happily for both, and for the rest of the festival public awaiting the opening bars of Walküre with bated breath and devout demeanour, the Master’s gatecrashing granddaughter remained unidentified.
The Wagner Clan Page 42